Why Nvidia?

[Ksanti]

Now, I don't want to start a fanboy war here, but what is the arguement for the new Fermi cards over the 5000 series? Or Nvidia cards in general?

I can see PhysX could perhaps be a conceivable advantage in some situations, but that just adds to the price tag. As far as I can tell, there is no Nvidia card on the market that outperforms an equivalently prices ATi offering.

For example, the 5850 destroys the GTX 285 in pretty much any benchmark as far as I can tell, yet most 285's sell at around £300, and have only just hit a £240 mark with the release of Fermi, still more expensive than 5850 base marks.

I was under the impression the 480 is set to take on the 5870, and the 470 the 5850, but the 470 is pretty much 5870 money, and the 480 is closer to dual 5850's?

I could understand why one might go with nvidia if planning to go Quad SLi, simply because the 480 is slightly faster than the 5870, if money was no object, but there seems to be a lot more support for Fermi than in the ultra high-end market?

I don't want to trigger a flame war, but as far as I can see, the 5000 cards outperform the 400 cards consistently, and even now the 5000 cards still have better value than even the 200 series cards, and then the 4000 cards that are still being sold are even better priced.

So what is it that makes people love Fermi and at the moment Nvidia? I accept that fanboys exist but I don't get people logically choosing Nvidia over ATi for the most part right now?

 

[Ksanti]

As far as I can tell there are very few sites which seem to be saying that Fermi has beaten the 5000 series, and the blind love for Fermi on the part of anandtech seems questionable to say the least.

3d vision: Bumps up the price take for the same performance, needs irritating active shutter glasses which you need to buy over and over if you want to play or watch movies with friends, monitors cost more, and the performance drop essentially means graphics cards cost more:

iz3d: slightly buggy, just as convincing 3d effect, much more comfortable and normal looking glasses, no need for expensive active shutter glasses, a community which isn't stuffed full of nvidia fanboys and actually answer questions helpfully.

ATi 3D: Hadn't heard too much of this, but to be honest I'm not too bothered about 3d right now, I'd rather put the money to components than a visual treat which only makes a difference when gaming and hampers playability of a game (refocusing your eyes etc.)

PhysX: I agree mostly with ATi's opinion on this, that Nvidia are just pushing PhysX this hard so they can say they have PhysX and shift their lower end cards, and developers are only implementing it (with a few exceptions) because Nvidia is throwing money at them. In a game I'm not really going to be blown away by paper flying around rather than photorealistic graphics, and I'm certainly not willing to pay extra for a feature like that which hampers performance, costs more and doesn't really add anything to the experience.

Drivers: That's been a common nvidia arguement from what I've heard, but as far as I can tell they're pretty much the same as ATi, and even if they're better, the ultimate performance still goes to ATi.

Overall it just seems that what I've got from this thread is that Nvidia is only worth it if you can justify gimmicks as features. 3d gaming is all well and good, but I sure as hell am not dropping £500 to get a set up which will be improved and removed from production by this time next year, rather than just improved is the case with graphics but totally made redundant.

And I've started a fanboy war, but even the massively biased fanboy comments from the nvidia fans haven't convinced me, even if I took them as valid sources, I'm not going to pay more for support for something that'll require me to spend more on hardware to get the same performance (i.e. a physX 3d vision card, then drop more money on a secondary PhysX card and 3d setup, then realise to get the original performance you need to get a whole new card)